Writer's Blog: Interactive Mystery

The second half of Chapter 10 will release within the next few days, after which I’ll post this month’s schedule. The word count has gone up to 295k, with the new scenes (yes, scenes plural!) adding quite a bit of length. Annie and Cass get their moment of glory! There’s a rousing game of Chuck-It! The ball gets confiscated by a super diabolical villain! 

. . . It’s all very exciting. Not everyone will choose to get this scene with the shih tzus, however.

One of the trickiest things about writing an interactive fiction mystery is knowing that, if certain routes aren’t chosen, players will inevitably miss out on clues. While this increases replay value, it also risks the main narrative coming across as disjointed and/or half-baked. Making sure that foreshadowing is semi-equally dispersed is something that will be one of the primary concerns for my final edit, but right now I’m just trying to make sure the story makes sense. (My philosophy on writing is to finish first, and worry about it being good later. Otherwise, projects never get finished.)

Don’t get me wrong: some clues are very much intended to only be recognized upon a second playthrough (like all of Glitch’s hints that K isn’t a Ment, or other things which I can’t yet discuss but a few genius souls have somehow picked up on). Other clues, like Noh’s perspective, solve minor mysteries right from the get-go instead of delaying their reveal: if your Button took the subway to Aeon, that Chapter 2 scene in the bathroom reads very differently, as do the tiny references to Button’s distracted “humming.” You also get more insight into how Noh and Vengeance interacted prior to the story’s beginning; if you don’t see at least one of the graffitied brooms in person, the purpose of the artwork is never explained.

As a player, I hate being railroaded down certain pathways by the narrative—even though it often leads to a better story! I try to let people choose alternate scenes and avoid characters they dislike, even it means missing out on a sizeable chunk of insight into the mystery. After all, Button isn’t going to learn anything new should they choose to sulk silently in their room . . . but given everything Button’s gone through lately, this is a pretty reasonable desire that I think should be included for roleplay (especially for all the morbid “my soul is the blackness of a mourning veil” Buttons).

For setting up essential scenes, I often utilize time skips. How Button got to the hospital or returned to Aeon is left up to reader imagination—you’re free to imagine that they went willingly, or that they were dragged through the door kicking and screaming. When an essential scene is part of a continuous day, however, this becomes harder to smoothly orchestrate.

I suppose a solution would be to reveal the same information in two different ways in two different scenes, but I feel like that defeats the entire purpose of having the choice in the first place. Every time you replay Mind Blind, I want each Button to be working from a different set of information, starting immediately from the branching pathways in Chapter 1. That way, even if you play the same character again and again (as I do, because I will never not play as a Chaotic Good Snarker MC), you may find your Button making different decisions based on alternate assumptions that they possess.

All this is handy-dandy for roleplaying. But, as I mentioned above, it’s not the easiest way to write a mystery novel. In the end, Button is as good as a detective as you play them as being. Buttons will need to be proactive in order to solve Mind Blind’s major mysteries by themselves, which means asking lots of questions and interacting with all the characters. Otherwise, some major plot points will be narrated at the end via villain . . . and it’s way more fun to interrupt mid-evil monologue with a condescending “Duh, Dr. McEvil, I already figured that out.”